“I do wish he were here, to receive the accolades,” Tamara Payne said of her father. Tamara Payne helped complete “The Dead Are Arising,” which has been praised highly by critics and last fall won a National Book Award. He began working on the Malcolm X book in 1990 and compiled more than 100 hours of interviews, including with family members of the late Black activist, before he died. The Pulitzer for “The Dead Are Arising” continues the posthumous acclaim for Les Payne, an award-winning Newsday journalist who died in 2018. Her previous honors include a National Book Award for “The Round House” and the National Book Critics Circle prize for “LaRose.” It was the first Pulitzer for Erdrich, who turned 67 this week and has been a published author for more than 40 years. Pulitzer judges called Erdrich’s novel “a majestic, polyphonic novel about a community’s efforts to halt the proposed displacement and elimination of several Native American tribes in the 1950s, rendered with dexterity and imagination.” It’s something indigenous people also know about well. “I love this city and it hurts to know how deep the racism goes. She called the Pulitzer a welcome contrast to the news of the past year. It is very moving, this is very moving recognition,” said Erdrich, who runs an independent bookstore in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed in May 2020. “This story belongs to him and to the Turtle Mountain people. Marcia Chatelain, whose “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America” won for history, said that she felt honored to be among a group of writers who have “tried to find a way to make clear that writing about race is fundamental to understanding what we need as a society.”Įrdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, has drawn upon her background and blended the traditions of oral and written storytelling for such acclaimed novels as “The Round House” and “The Plague of Doves.” She based “The Night Watchman” on the life of her maternal grandfather, a night watchman whose reservation in rural North Dakota was threatened in the 1950s by congressional legislation. “All of these voices are so important and always have been important.”
“What the Pulitzers are awarding this year seems so timely,” Tamara Payne, Les Payne’s daughter and the principal researcher for his book, told The Associated Press. The news also comes amid an intensifying debate over race and education, with legislators in Texas and elsewhere seeking to restrict the teaching of racial injustice.
The awards were announced Friday during a remote ceremony that honored the best work in journalism and the arts in 2020, a year defined in part by the police killing of George Floyd and the protests and reckoning which followed.
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